Mallin gave one of his little secretive smiles, the sort he gave when he was one up on somebody.
“We got it from Xerxes. The Company’s started producing it, but unfortunately, the Fuzzies don’t like it. We still can’t find out why; it’s made on exactly the same formula. And as it’s entirely up to Government specifications, Mr. Grego was able to talk Commodore Napier into accepting it in exchange for what he has on hand. We have about five tons of it. How much do you need at Holloway’s Camp? Will a couple of tons help you any?”
Would a couple of tons help them any? “Why, I don’t know how to thank you, Dr. Mallin! Of course it will; we’ve been giving it to our Fuzzies, a quarter-cake apiece on alternate days.” I muust be very, VERY, nice to Dr Mallin! “Why don’t they like the stuff you people have been making? What’s wrong with it?”
“We don’t know. Mr. Grego has been raging at everybody to find out; it’s made in exactly the same way…”
WHEN MALCOLM DUNBAR lighted his screen, Dr. Jan Christiaan Hoenveld appeared in it. He didn’t waste time on greetings or other superfluities.
“I think we have something, Mr. Dunbar. There is a component in both the Odin Dietetics and the Argentine Syntho-Foods products that is absent from our own product. It is not one of the synthetic nutrient or vitamin or hormone compounds which are part of the field-ration formula; it is not a compound regularly synthesized, either commercially or experimentally in any laboratory I know of. It’s a rather complicated long-chain organic molecule; most of it seems to be oxygen-hydrogen-carbon, but there are a few atoms of titanium in it. If that’s what the Fuzzies find lacking in our products, all I can say is that they have the keenest taste perception of any creature, sapient or nonsapient, that I have ever heard of.”
“All right, then; they have. I saw them reject our Extee-Three in disgust, and then Mr. Grego gave them a little of the Argentine stuff, and they ate it with the greatest pleasure. How much of this unknown compound is there in Extee-Three?”
“About one part in ten thousand,” Hoenveld said.
“And the titanium?”
“Five atoms out of sixty-four in the molecule.”
“That’s pretty keen tasting.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose it’s in the wheat; the rest of that stuff is synthesized.”
“Well, naturally, Mr. Dunbar. That would seem to be the inescapable conclusion,” Hoenveld said, patronizingly.
“We have quite a bit of metallic titanium, imported in fabricated form before we got our own steel-mills working. Do you think you could synthesize that molecule, Dr. Hoenveld?”
Hoenveld gave him a look of undisguised contempt. “Certainly, Mr. Dunbar. In about a year and a half to two years. As I understand, the object of manufacturing the stuff here is to supply a temporary shortage which will be relieved in about six months, when imported Extee-Three begins coming in from Marduk. Unless I am directly and specifically ordered to do so by Mr. Grego, I will not waste my time on trying.”
OF COURSE, IT was ending in a cocktail party. Wherever Terran humans went, they planted tobacco and coffee, to have coffee and cigarettes for breakfast, and wherever they went they found or introduced something that would ferment to produce C 2 H 5 OH and around 1730-ish each day, they had Cocktail Hour. The natives on planets like Loki and Gimli and Thor and even Shesha and Uller thought it was a religious observance.
Maybe it was, at that.
Sipping his own cocktail, Gerd van Riebeek ignored, for a moment, the conversation in which he had become involved and eavesdropped on his wife and Claudette Pendarvis and Ernst Mallin and Ahmed Khadra and Sandra Glenn.
“Well, we want to keep them here for at least a week before we let people take them away,” the Chief Justice’s wife was saying. “You’ll have to stay with us for a day or so, Ruth, and help us teach them what to expect in their new homes.”
“You’re going to have to educate the people who adopt them,” Sandra Glenn said. “What to expect and what not to expect from Fuzzies. I think, evening classes. Language, for one thing.”
“You know,” Mallin said, “I’d like to take a few Fuzzies around through the other units of the sanatorium, to visit the patients. The patients here would like it. They don’t have an awful lot of fun, you know.”
That was new for Ernst Mallin. He never seemed to recall that Mallin had thought having fun was important, before. Maybe the Fuzzies had taught him that it was.
The group he was drinking with were Science Center and Public Health people. One of them, a woman gynecologist, was wondering what Chris Hoenveld had found out, so far.
“What can he find out?” Raynier, the pathologist, asked. “He only has the one specimen, and it probably isn’t there at all, it’s probably something in the mother’s metabolism. It might be radioactivity, but that would only produce an occasional isolated case, and from what you’ve seen, it seems to be a racial characteristic. I think you’ll find it in the racial dietary habits.”
“Land-prawns,” somebody suggested. “As far as I know, nothing else eats them but Fuzzies; that right, Gerd?”
“Yes. We always thought they had no natural enemies at all, till we found out about the Fuzzies. But it’s been our observation that Fuzzies won’t take anything that’ll hurt them.”
“They won’t take anything that gives them a bellyache or a hangover, no. They can establish a direct relationship there. But whatever caused this defective birth we were investigating, and I agree that that’s probably a common thing with Fuzzies, was something that acted on a level the Fuzzies couldn’t be aware of. I think there’s a good chance that eating land-prawns may be responsible.”
“Well, let’s find out. Put Chris Hoenveld to work on that.”
“You put him to work on it. Or get Victor Grego to; he won’t throw Grego out of his lab. Chris is sore enough about this Fuzzy business as it is.”
“Well, we’ll have to study more than one fetus. We have a hundred and fifty Fuzzies here, we ought to find something out…”
“Isolate all the pregnant females; get Mrs. Pendarvis to withhold them from adoption…”
“… may have to perform a few abortions…”
“… microsurgery; fertilized ova…”
That wasn’t what he and Ruth and Jack Holloway had had in mind, when they’d brought this lot to Mallorysport. But they had to find out; if they didn’t, in a few more generations there might be no more Fuzzies at all. If a few of them suffered, now…
Well, hadn’t poor Goldilocks had to be killed before the Fuzzies were recognized for the people they were?
“TITANIUM,” VICTOR GREGO said. “Now that’s interesting.”
“Is that all you can call it, Mr. Grego?” Dunbar, in the screen, demanded. “I call it impossible. I was checking up. Titanium, on this planet, is damn near as rare as calcium on Uller. It’s present, and that’s all; I’ll bet most of the titanium on Zarathustra was brought here in fabricated form between the time the planet was discovered and seven years ago when we got our steel-mill going.”
That was a big exaggeration, of course. It existed, but it was a fact that they’d never been able to extract it by any commercially profitable process, and on Zarathustra they used light-alloy steel for everything for which titanium was used elsewhere. So a little of it got picked up, as a trace-element, in wheat grown on Terra or on Odin, but it was useless to hope for it in Zarathustran wheat.
“It looks,” he said, “as though we’re stuck, Mal. Do you think Chris Hoenveld could synthesize that molecule? We could add it to the other ingredients…”
“He says he could — in six months to a year. He refuses to try unless you order him categorically to.”